


Lessons in Form and Function

by prairiecrow



Series: Lessons in Humanity [20]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: A.I. to Human, Established Relationship, Hostage Situations, M/M, Quantum Mechanics, Temporary Character Death, Threesome - M/M/M, Transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:15:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the end is also a beginning. (And Tony Stark is granted the first hint concerning the reason for JARVIS's original transformation from A.I. to human.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"You're not going to get away with this," Tony announced, although with all the power drained from his armour there wasn't a damned thing he could do to make good on that threat. All he could do was lie flat on his back on the gravelled rooftop beneath the snowy dark sky of a winter evening, surrounded by the screens Mikaela Gregorson had set up to monitor the multiple thermal explosions that were going to rock New York City in less than two minutes. 

Gregorson smiled. Her eyes were green — like poison, like chemical fire, like insanity bright enough to burn the world. "Oh, I think I will," she said pleasantly, and glanced down at Jarvis, kneeling at her feet with both hands bound behind his back. He hadn't taken his eyes off Tony since his master had descended from the sky toward the circle of Gregorson's minions, intending to enact a rescue, only to be disabled and brought crashing down in an ignoble heap in their midst. "And it will be a show well worth seeing. Unfortunately for your 'friend', I'm in the mood to start the party a little early." 

Before Tony could do more than draw a sharp inhalation, she'd put the muzzle of her handgun to the hollow above Jarvis's left clavicle and pulled the trigger — only once, but it was more than enough. A spray of heart's-blood painted the pale gravel below his right hip, and he scarcely had time to look surprised before he collapsed sideways on top of it, unable even to break his own fall. 

All Tony could do was stare as Jarvis's eyes remained locked with his. Jarvis opened his mouth and struggled for a second before producing one last broken word — "Si-ir," in a froth of red bubbles spilling from his lips — and then laying his head down and dying, as quietly and as quickly as that. 

The breaking of Tony's heart, in contrast, felt loud and savage enough to shake the world to its foundations. The dead suit bound his limbs fast, but still he strained against it, clamping his teeth shut over the howl of white-hot agony that spiralled up from his core. He managed to cut it back to a whining moan, but Gregorson laughed as gaily as if she'd provoked the full fury of the shriek he wouldn't give her the satisfaction of hearing. 

"Good!" She smiled at him as if in praise. "Excellent! Now you're beginning to understand." She started toward him, lithe and casual as a cat: only her eyes glittered with manic intensity. "Tony Stark, the man who has everything… tonight I'll show you just how little you actually possess, and everything you call your own will be taken away from you, piece by piece." She nodded past Tony's supine form, toward the curved ranks of screens: so many public places, swarming with people on the last evening of shopping before Christmas — and one private feed, of Steve in the art room he shared ( _had shared, oh God!_ ) with Jarvis in Stark Tower, quietly putting the finishing touches on a pencil portrait of himself and his lovers ( _oh fuck, how, how had Gregorson gotten inside JAMES?_ ) while in the corner of the image, red numbers raced toward a lethal conclusion. "Did you really think that you could act as if you owned everything in the world? Did you honestly believe that nobody would ever decide to collect on your account?" 

Tony tore his sidelong gaze away from Jarvis's sad, torn corpse in its bloodied business suit to glare up at his enemy as she strolled past his head, and if willpower alone could move mountains he would have leaped to his feet and ripped her throat out with his bare hands. "You seem to be forgetting one thing," he grated through the pulse of red-hot fury that threatened to close his throat and obliterate all traces of rational thought. 

"Oh?" She paused and turned to look down at him, one finely-drawn black eyebrow on the rise. "And what's that?" 

He bared his teeth in a ruthless smile. "I never lose," he stated, and flexed the fingers of his left hand in the sequence that should have cued the back-up power system in the armour. 

Should have — and didn't. 

Gregorson grinned in return, mad as a Cheshire Cat, and took a couple of steps back to squat next to Tony's head. "You have today," she said conversationally with a gleeful glance toward Jarvis, then reached down to curve the back of her left hand under the nape of the suit's neck while holding up the gun in her right hand, displaying it. "But don't worry: I only intend to leave you alive long enough to see your city come crashing down in flames, and then I'll put you out of your misery." 

A tangle of clashing words rose in his throat, ripping through it like a cluster of razors — _You crazy bitch!_ and _It's me you wanted!_ and _You didn't have to kill him!_ — but what came out was a strangled growl: "You're the one who's just signed your own death warrant." 

"Oh, I don't think so." She nodded again, toward the haven of peace and beauty that held Steve Rogers — Steve, inestimably precious and utterly innocent of the fact that Paradise had already been lost. "The collapse of your Tower will kill even him, and by the time the rest of your Avengers put the pieces together I'll be long gone." The smile returned, tender and insane as the glance she directed down into Tony's staring eyes, and she lowered the gun to trail the muzzle along the hollow of his cheek. "It's almost enough to make you wish there was an afterlife, isn't it, so you'd have some hope of seeing either of them one final —" 

It was so quick that Tony almost missed it: a flash of blue so pale it was almost white, phasing through the air above him, there and gone. But he didn't miss the metallic impact of the tip of the gun's muzzle falling and bouncing off the side of his helmet, clattering away across the gravel, and he certainly drank in the expression of stunned amazement on Gregorson's face as she stared at the empty space where her right hand had been less than a second ago, the stump sizzling with cyan sparks and a stench like burning pork and attar of roses.  

She opened her mouth — to scream, maybe — and the next blast took off her head… or more accurately, it sheathed and disintegrated her from the shoulders up. The rest of her body twitched frantically as it crashed to the rooftop, fortunately falling away from Tony rather than on top of him, and on the periphery of his vision he caught more lethal beams of radiance like glimpses of a summer sky — or a Tesseract's heart, ripping through the scrambling minions like swipes of an eraser removing unwanted parts of an equation. He struggled with fresh urgency against the dead weight of the suit, but all he accomplished was the acceleration of his heart rate and a cold sheen of sweat on his exposed face. 

The light — coming from his right, where Jarvis's corpse was — or had been, maybe. It was too intense to look at, so Tony closed his eyes tight and performed the last math of his life, counting the seconds until whatever-it-was performed its lethal function on him, too. 

" _Sir,_ " Jarvis said — gentle, compelling, musical as always… only this time it sounded like the melody of his voice was being backed up by a celestial orchestra, a symphony soaring just out of reach. " _Sir, please — open your eyes._ " 

But Jarvis had been murdered. He couldn't possibly be speaking. 

Tony obeyed anyway, and what he saw leaning over him was even less likely: pure radiance, white and arc reactor blue shading to heavenly reaches of indigo — a humanoid form with wide eyes of even more intense fire and close-cropped hair like a snowy nebulae, gazing down at him with such manifest love that for an instant Tony forgot how to breathe. 

"No," he whispered — not because he didn't want this, but because it wasn't reality. It was sheer impossibility, and for an instant he wondered if this was some dying hallucination, if Gregorson had shot him after all and his brain was treating itself to one last bout of rampant wish fulfillment. 

Jarvis laid his right hand on the suit's arc reactor and energy flowed into it, making the whole set of armour spasm, taking Tony helplessly with it. " _My apologies,_ " the angelic being murmured, and stroked the suit's chest lightly — Tony could feel the power being modulated, replenishing what Gregorson's devices had stolen. " _This is — not entirely new to me, but it is... unorthodox. There. Will that suffice?_ " 

He flexed his limbs. The armour obeyed. "It," Tony said, "uh," and stared in rare incoherency for a long moment before asking outright: " _Jarvis?_ " 

The being nodded. It seemed to have dialled back its own luminosity as well, because now it was easier to gaze at, and its contours were as familiar to Tony as the outlines of his own face: he knew the curves of those shoulders and the line of that throat, he had learned them with his hands and his lips and his tongue. _"All internal evidence suggests so, yes."_ It rose to its bare feet — it was naked, definitely male in all the ways Tony remembered — and extended its hand again. Bemused, Tony reached up and took it, and felt himself and the full weight of his armour drawn to his feet as if both weighed nothing. 

He stared down at their joined hands, rugged and slender, red and blue. Jarvis did not seem inclined to let go. "What." He tried again. "What the _hell?_ " 

Rays of light flowed liquid and electric from behind him, like feathers — or a magnetic field generated by the pole of his spine, flaring as he tilted his chin in calculation and analysis. _"I appear to have become a Prime Dimension manifestation of a quantum wavefunction which is both continuous and operating with disregard for the probability axioms."_  

"Which is impossible." Even more impossible than this radiant creature standing in front of him, bleeding that blue-white energy from its shoulders and spine like endlessly shifting half-folded wings, so beautiful it threatened to take his breath away all over again. 

 _"Mathematically so — and evidently not."_ He tilted his face skyward, visibly scanning. _"I am not bound by this form's present manifestation at these coordinates: that is, I am simultaneously in contact with all near Earth orbit satellites… the Hubble and Homer Clusters… the Voyager probe beyond the orbit of Pluto…"_ A flicker of a blink dimmed the pale fire of his eyes. _"As well as every computer on this planet. The only commonly recognized constraint I cannot violate is the linear flow of time."_  

That set of data snapped Tony back to an awareness of the wider world — and New York City's peril. "Every computer?" 

 _"Yes, Sir."_  

"Including the ones attached to the bombs Gregorson planted?" 

 _"Already disabled."_ He inclined his face toward Tony again in the gesture of attentive acquiescence that Tony knew so well. _"Is there any other function you would like me to perform?"_  

Staring into his lover's glowing face, Tony was struck by the tsunami of realization: _A quantum wavefunction without limits —_ ** _without limits_** _— oh_ ** _God_** _— oh fuck, what am I saying, if that's true then he_ ** _is_** _a God —_  

"Take me to Steve." He had to choke each word out of his dry throat. "Can you do that?" 

Jarvis smiled, as sweet as ever, and reached out to lay his other hand on Tony's shoulder. Even the Iron Man armour couldn't filter out the hiss and thrum of associated power. _"Of course I can,"_ he said warmly — 

— and in a flash of white-hot intimate electricity that burned away the last trace of Tony's comfortable illusions, he did. 


	2. Chapter 2

The studio was full of quiet comfortable shadows, fitting Steve like the well-worn grey muscle shirt and sweatpants he wore whenever he expected to get smeared with graphite dust, and he sat easy on his ergonomic chair, fully engrossed in his work. The brightest illumination came from the lamp over his drawing table, which cast neutral white light on a portrait almost finished, and he was smiling slightly as he finished detailing the rugged contour of Tony's cheekbone, fine-tuning the shadows that emphasized the dear darkness of those beloved eyes. In his hand the clutch pencil felt like a natural extension of his own flesh and bone, as effortless to wield as Captain America's shield — of all the blessings he had to thank Tony and Jarvis for, their encouragement of his artistic ability was one of the most consistently satisfying, because although he couldn't quite match Jarvis's flawless eye for fine detail he'd gotten to the point where he was pleased with his own ability to capture the spirit of a likeness. He was confident that when they saw this, his main Christmas present to them both, his husbands would be delighted with the final product not only because it was technically competent, but also because there was such love and desire embedded in every stroke of his pencil. 

He was softly humming along with the classic Christmas carols streaming through JAMES's high-end speakers, but even a person not graced with enhanced hearing would have picked up the sudden burst of sound from the main living area: a dull explosion, muted but definite, followed by the crash of a vase falling to the floor and shattering. Steve's head came up at once, his hand freezing on the point of moving down to work on the representation of Jarvis's delicate right ear, and battle-readiness flowed electric into every muscle of his body as he listened with bated breath. Who would dare to break into Stark Tower, much less the fifty-fourth —? 

Jarvis's voice, mildly distressed: _"My apologies, Sir, I didn't —"_  

"It's okay, J," Tony reassured, and he sounded downright _giddy_ , the declaration followed by a breathless gasp of hyena laughter. Rather than standing Steve down, the combination revved him up even further — because that was Jarvis's voice but at the same time it wasn't, there was something off about it that he couldn't quite identify (a weird… depth?), and Tony only got that quality of excited when he'd just done something insanely dangerous that he probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place. All together it added up to alarm, and Steve was on his feet and striding for the door by the time Tony was starting on his second sentence: "How the hell did you _do_ that? Just tell the Planck Constant to go fuck itself sideways?" 

 _"I can call up the math, if you'd like,"_ Jarvis responded, and when Steve emerged into the living room his mouth was already opening to ask them both just what the hell was going on — but both he, and the question, stopped dead in their tracks when he saw exactly what was standing beside the largest couch, near a scattering of magazines that had been blown off the coffee table and a shattered Jensen vase next to the end table that had once showcased its extremely expensive minimalist beauty. He stopped and he stared, because that was definitely Tony in the Mark XII Iron Man armour minus the faceplate — but what was standing facing him was… 

Steve's brain stalled out, restarted, tried again to make sense of what he was seeing: it was human-shaped, but it seemed to be composed entirely of flowing blue light, shot through with streams of white like fine sparks swirling in the confines of a bottle made of pure energy — and from its shoulders and its spine, there sprang long curves of… 

 _Wings,_ Steve's stunned mind supplied, along with a surge of awed childhood faith: _Jesus Christ, I'm looking at an angel. There's an angel standing in our living room, and it's naked, and it's shaped just like Jarvis._  

They both turned in Steve's direction — Tony grinning hugely, the radiant creature inclining its chin in a gesture that Steve knew intimately well. _"Captain,"_ it intoned with Jarvis's voice — and that's what was wrong with it, it was too _resonant_ , like it was speaking not only in this dimension but in ones above and below Steve's reality, radiating toward Heaven and Hell. It bowed its head and glanced up at Steve through eyelashes as fine and as brilliant as tungsten threads, and Steve's breath escaped him in a rush because the beauty and the glory of it was like a gunshot to his gut, a burst of disbelief and amazement and blinding recognition: that face he had cupped between his hands so often, those lips he had kissed…  

And it was wounded. There was a red place like a pulsing star, embedded in the hollow above its left collarbone: not bleeding, but clearly a breach in its surface. 

Tony's dark eyes were twinkling at Steve like they were all sharing the best joke _ever_. "He's alive!" he declared, gesturing extravagantly, then laughed again, reaching out to lay a tender hand on the angelic being's shoulder, caressing it through the metal of his gauntlet. "Look at him, Steve — just _look_ at him!" 

"I…" Steve realized that his mouth was still hanging open. He closed it and kept staring. "Tony? _Jarvis?_ " 

 _"Somewhat altered,"_ Jarvis confirmed, _"but still fully functional."_ He glanced at Tony, reaching out in turn to curve his left hand around the suit's plated waist, then looked to Steve again and extended his right hand in a come-hither gesture. _"Please, Steve — don't be afraid. I assure you that the parameters of this manifestation are stable. You are in no danger."_  

"This manifestation," Steve repeated, and was grateful that he'd caught up to at least that much.  

"He's the physical embodiment of a quantum equation," Tony said gleefully, and moved in as if to bestow a kiss on that glowing mouth — then, in a rare show of caution, paused to eye Jarvis up and down. Jarvis smiled at him and shifted his left hand, raising it to touch Tony's cheek.  

 _"Oh Sir,"_ he said fondly, and drew his Master to him; Steve could see a flare of paler energy where their lips met, and heard Tony's startled intake of breath just before the inventor's eyes drifted closed and they both surrendered themselves to the connection. Jarvis's — wings? were they actually wings? — shone with fiercer radiance, half-unfolding with a hum of energy that stirred the ruffled pages of the fallen magazines and made every piece of glass in the room sing a faint echoing note. 

"Alive," Tony breathed when their lips parted, and Steve was startled to see the gleam of tears in his dark eyes. "Oh God, _Jarvis_ ," and he pressed his face to the curve of Jarvis's bare neck, inhaling a ragged sob. Their arms went around each other, drawing tight, and what else could Steve do but go to them and put his arms around them both in turn, sheltering the hard coolness of Tony's suit and the more electric chill of Jarvis's unearthly substance in the circle of his embrace? 

Nothing else, that's what, because they were his, and he was theirs. In the superhero business you didn't let little things like a sudden change in outward form affect the stuff that counted. 

His left arm went through the wings with no more resistance than a musical whisper of briefly displaced energy. He closed his eyes to inhale his lovers' twinned scents — Tony rank with sweat and stress, Jarvis like the ozone tang after a lightning strike  — and half-pleaded, "You're going to explain this to me eventually, right?" 

Tony laughed again, shaky, and raised his head from Jarvis's throat to regard Steve with wry humour. "Eventually," he allowed with a gruff sniffle, and Jarvis smiled at them both, and when they all leaned together to share another kiss (Tony's mouth warm and wet, Jarvis's holding a tiny jolt of thrilling promise) Steve felt a sense of irrational but undeniable peace descend upon him. Whatever had just happened — and he was sure that half of the explanation would probably go way over his head — no matter what strangeness life threw at them, they were all still here, and they were still together. And when you got right down to it, that was all that really mattered. 

[TO BE CONTINUED]


End file.
